Removing built-in styles in Microsoft Word 2003

Microsoft Word is an industry standard word processing tool that is most widely used in in the field of technical writing. MS Word is most often used to prepare manuals, process guides, procedures, proposals and others documents. Every company has a brand name associated to it and to make their documentation unique, they use their own style and format to prepare documents.

In one of my recent observation I came across a tech writer who was trying to over ride a built-in style but was not able to do so. This post is for all those technical writers who use custom styles and would like to remove the build in styles. Following the below mentioned procedure will help you avoid MS Word built-in styles like Heading 7, Heading 8 and Heading 9 for example.

Procedure

1. Open MS Word

2. Select New from the File menu to display the New Document task pane. This appears to the right of your screen.

3. Click On my computer link under Templates on the New Document task pane.

6. Click the Organizer button. The Organizer dialog box appears. All styles in the normal.dot template is listed in list box to the right.

7. Select all the styles in the list box and delete them.

The following mandatory styles will be retained in the template.

Default Paragraph Font

No list

Normal

Table Normal

These styles are necessary for Word to function.

Note: Keep a copy of the normal.dot template at another location on your computer. Incase you face any issues or you need the styles back or any other unknown issue due to this you can replace the Normal.dot.

I’ve performed this task on my computer and MS Word works fine without any issues.

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This entry was posted on April 3, 2009 at 8:42 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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